Though the organization is relatively new, the idea of an organization designed to promote southern labor history goes back to 1966, when a group of Southern Historical Association (SHA) members who had been meeting annually decided to form their own organization called the Association of Southern Labor Historians (ASLH). Although the organization had largely disbanded by 1972, Merl E. Reed and Gary M. Fink initiated a biennial conference to continue its past efforts. The Southern Labor History Conference (later named the Southern Labor Studies Conference) first met in Atlanta in the spring of 1976 and sponsored sessions from historians, activists and labor leaders. Almost every two years since then, labor activists and academics have met to exchange scholarship and experiences. Over the years several volumes of edited collections were published from these conferences.
In May 2007 at the joint Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA)-Southern Labor Studies Conference at Duke University, a group of people voted to create a Southern Labor Studies Association to put the conference on a more secure footing. Professor Heather Thompson, then of UNC-Charlotte, was elected its president by acclamation. That meeting led to many exciting conversations about what the association could do beyond the confines of the conference to promote the study, teaching, and preservation of southern labor and working class history. The SLSA then affiliated with the Labor and Working-Class History Association (www.lawcha.org), the Southern Historical Association (http://www.uga.edu/~sha/), and the Southern Industrialization Project (susanna.delfino@virgilio.it).
